


West of Hallownest

by Schnikeys



Category: Hollow Knight (Video Game)
Genre: Don’t copy to another site, Gen, Pre-Canon, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-03
Updated: 2019-09-03
Packaged: 2020-10-06 10:23:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,769
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20505407
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Schnikeys/pseuds/Schnikeys
Summary: Where did the Knight come from, west of Hallownest?





	West of Hallownest

**Author's Note:**

> neither god nor the elements of style can stop me from writing video game protagonist narration in second person singular

The village is small, but the looks you get when you walk in the gate aren’t hostile. Mostly, the looks you get are concerned, which means you’re going to be addressed as a child a lot, which can be helpful. The rest of the concern is probably for the odd blade on your back, but that can’t be helped.

There’s a tavern in the middle of the village. Taverns are usually a good bet; free seats, and they’re always looking for people to do odd jobs. Bugs use chits as currency in this area, and you don’t have any left.

You jog in the door behind a few other people and slip around the edges of the room to huddle by the fire. Cold doesn’t affect you, and neither does most heat, but crouching by the fireplace is the most normal thing you can do in a tavern, considering you can’t eat, drink, or use the outhouse.

The place is about half full, by your estimation. The words you overhear are recognizable, which is good; it’s always challenging to learn a new language. You wait for people to lose interest in you, rubbing your hands together before the flames, before you trot over to the counter and scramble your way onto a chair.

The tavern keeper is a squat bug with impressive mandibles. He squints at you. “You’re a little young to be up here.”

You shake your head, mime wiping something off of the counter, point at a pile of coins another patron has left to pay for their drinks.

“You want to work?” The tavern keeper looks skeptical. “Who did you come here with?”

You shake your head again. No one. 

“Hmph.” The tavern keeper leans back, giving you an appraising look.

“Go on, Rendel,” A beetle speaks up from your right, only slurring a little. “Let the little thing earn their keep, eh?”

“Fencha, I’m counting how many you’ve had this time, mark my words.” 

“You can’t begrudge my one night a week!” The beetle - Fencha? - and Rendel both laugh. This is probably an old joke. You look back and forth between them; sometimes this is seen as endearing, and it gets a better response than staying completely still.

“Fine, fine.” Rendel reaches under the counter and tosses a rag your way. You almost manage to catch it out of the air; it hits your face instead. Fencha chuckles. “I’ll give you ten chits if you pick up all the garbage these heathens have dropped on the floor, and ten more if you wipe down the empty tables and chairs.”

You nod and move to hop down.

“And take that thing off!” You look to see that Rendel is pointing at your - blade. (You always find yourself about to call it something else in your head, but “blade” is all that comes to mind.)

As much as you dislike putting it down, you want to have real lodgings for the night, and in a town this small, it’s not worth it to irritate the tavern keeper. You sling it off your back and move to tuck it carefully under the chair. 

“No, no, someone could step on that! Give it here.” Rendel holds his hand out expectantly. You give him the blade, shoving down your reluctance. 

“Harsh, Rendel.”

“Everyone else has to leave weapons by the door, I’m not making an exception for unaccompanied toddlers,” Rendel gripes.

You might not be a toddler, but you suppose that’s fair. Still, you’re acutely aware of the area where Rendel stowed your blade under the counter the rest of the night as you pick up trash and stand on chairs to wash the tables. Some patrons stare. Others titter and chuckle at the physical comedy of your attempts to clean tables as tall as you are. That’s good. Laughter means you’re harmless, and you don’t want to fight right now.

At the end of the night, you take the chits Rendel hands you and offer them right back, pointing at the door that leads to the rented rooms upstairs. He seems surprised. 

“Haven’t you had anything to eat?” He says.

You nod hastily. Expressing what you do or don’t do with food is always a hassle.

“Well. Alright, then,” he says, still sounding dubious.

The room is relatively tiny, with just enough room for a cot and a washbasin, but it’s perfectly sized for you. You lie down, place your blade in the bed next to you, and feel your aches melt away as you drop into nothingness.

* * *

Rendel doesn’t object to you spending your wages on a room in his own tavern, so you stay.

One day, you slip and slice your arm open while helping Rendel prepare a stew, and you don’t protest when he yells and jumps to his feet, wrapping a rag around your arm and carrying you the entire way to the village doctor. The sturdy beetle - Irne, Rendel called them - regards the void spilling out of the split with confusion and an air of faint offense, as if it’s a personal insult that your arm is doing something they haven’t seen before. They slather the cut with cooling gel, wrap it with a bandage, and tell you to be more careful.

It’s nice of them, if pointless, considering the wound melts away the next time you take a moment to rest. You keep the bandage on for a week anyway, for plausible deniability.

Some time ago - you can’t remember exactly how long ago, but it’s about as far back as you can remember - you were with a group of travelers after having been hurt. “Here,” one had said, pulling out a roll of bandages, “This will bind the cracks in your shell.”

The bandages had sat upon your mask until they’d fallen off of their own accord. That is how you’d learned that bugs must wrap their wounds to heal them. Like bugs, rest fixes your wounds (the feeling that your insides are about to come spilling out). Unlike bugs, bandages neither help nor hurt.

You wonder what you are if you’re not a bug.

* * *

You do dream like a bug, as far as you can tell. Though maybe with less detail and frequency.

The first dream you can remember is one of falling, which always ends with you being startled awake. For a long time, this meant that you avoided heights. 

Then one day you fell off of a cliff and discovered that you hit the ground with an impact, but no damage at all. Which is usual for bugs, but it also means you can’t think of a reason to have nightmares about heights. 

You experimented jumping off of lots of high things after that, trying to figure out where the flood of fear was coming from. Surely you couldn’t have formerly been more susceptible to gravity? Some bugs fear heights because of airborne predators - bats and the like - but that didn’t seem like the tone of your nightmares.

Lots of bugs you meet are frightened of water and drowning, so you theorized that you must have at some point fallen a long (long, long) way into water and almost drowned. Then you actually tried swimming and discovered that you are physically incapable of sinking and drowning, _unlike_ most bugs. You’re just too buoyant, and you don’t need to breathe. So that can’t be it either.

The fear of the nightmare fades over time, but you can’t shake the sense that it was the fall you feared, and not what was at the bottom. 

* * *

There’s a weaponsmith in this village. You save up extra chits for several weeks and go to consult her. She doesn’t recognize your blade either.

“This isn’t in very good shape,” she says dubiously, examining the cracked metal. “I’m surprised it hasn’t fallen apart already. There’s only so much I can do with an unfamiliar make.”

You expected this. You pay her for the trouble anyway and depart an hour later with a slightly more functional blade.

* * *

Despite the limitations of the tiny reach of your arms, Rendel doesn’t have quite enough for you to do all the time.

“There aren’t enough people in this village for your work ethic,” he huffs at you. Sometimes when he gets this tone of voice, he looks as though he’s considering patting you on the head, although he never does.

“I could use a helper,” Fencha suddenly pipes up. You don’t actually remember what it is that Fencha does.

Rendel scoffs. “And you have the time to train the little thing, do you?”

Fencha waves her mug airily. “I’ve seen how fast they learn! They should have more to do than sitting around in your tavern!”

(The general perception in the village has settled firmly on you being some sort of precocious feral child. You do not disabuse them of this notion.)

It turns out that aside from keeping domesticated midges for their eggs, which you also help her with, Fencha is a cartographer.

“It’s a trade of the family, see,” Fencha explains as you look at her drafting table, scattered with compasses and graphing tools and antennae-quills. “Not so much demand for it out here as out in Wooster, but we get enough travelers that it’s worthwhile to have maps of the area for sale. I don’t exactly have a press out here, and frankly, I could use someone making copies so I can work on new compositions. You’ve a steady hand, I’ve seen.”

You spend the first few weeks with her meticulously copying maps of the area around the village with slate and chalk, your lines getting smoother and surer. 

When you copy out the place names - City of Wooster, Downhill Dell, Dooster borough - Fencha looks over with surprise. 

“I didn’t know you could write,” she remarks. “This makes things much easier! Where did you learn?”

You stare at the slate, chalk curled in your fist.

Eventually, after much prodding, Fencha realizes that while you might have good penmanship, you can’t string two words together “for the life of you”, as she says. 

(You don’t know why. The first time you met people who talked with hands and not mouths, it took a whole year of doggedly copying their movements to admit that it was nearly impossible to produce them on your own, and actually impossible to put more than one word together in a row. You understand what people say just fine. But you can’t say anything.) 

* * *

The topic of discussion at the tavern tonight turns out to be you, likely because to all appearances you’re absorbed in shelling an entire basket of mites one by one. Then again, you’re not exactly across the room; you’re seated right there at the bar with them. Perhaps it’s a sign of safety, that people feel fondly enough about you to be comfortable testing your boundaries.

“Beetles hailing from Suthurk do _not_ have horns like that!” Pittarm roars, smacking his claw onto the bar.

“And you have a better guess, do you?” Yunwi challenges.

“I don’t have to have a better guess to know yours is wrong!”

“You know,” Fencha says thoughtfully, “I’ve seen folk much like the little thing in Dooster, visitors, I think.”

You perk up, despite yourself. Fencha doesn’t seem to notice. “White heads, horns, dark bodies, I’ve seen a few with similar garb, too.”

“Did they wash their garb?” Rendel asks, to which everyone laughs. So what if you don’t do laundry very often? You don’t get dirty as quickly.

“I assume so!” Fencha chuckles. “But they did have mouths,” she adds thoughtfully. “And they were less…” She gestures vaguely at you. You’re not even pretending not to listen anymore.

“Symmetrical?” Yunwi suggests. 

“Yes, that.”

They mean the way you don’t quite look like a bug. Probably also the way you don’t eat, or smell, or use the outhouse, or talk with hands or sound or chalk, or weigh anything at all.

“I think our little thing is one of a kind,” Pittarm declares with grandeur, as if it’s a point of pride. Which is nice, but. 

But there _are_ others like me, you think. You don’t know why you’re so sure, but you are.

* * *

Being part of a community is nice. You like it, you do. You like that you’re welcome to a seat in the tavern, you like knowing little things like the fact that Rendel likes mite legs for a snack, or that Yunwi has had a feud with her neighbor for nine years owing to a borrowed pot, or that Fencha goes to visit her family in Wooster every year.

Not to mention you know very well that not every community is as welcoming to strange, diminutive not-quite-bugs that come wandering in out of nowhere with no explanation, so you’re extra grateful when you’re welcomed into the fold.

It’s just...hard to feel permanently attached, when you’ve been so many places before, and left them all in time.

Sometimes you weren’t welcome. Sometimes you got bored. Sometimes disaster struck, and wherever you were staying just didn’t exist anymore. And sometimes, you stayed long enough that everyone you’d known when you first arrived was dead.

It doesn’t bother you much anymore. But you don’t care for the sense of distance.

* * *

( _**\- BREAK -**_)

\- A scream shatters your sleep, rattling inside your head, and you rocket upright, a room laced with chains scratched into your mind.

You wait, something pulsing anxiously in your chest. No sounds, no sign of anyone roused. That horrible shriek was just a dream.

But.

No. No, you don’t have dreams like that. The sound isn’t fading from your memory, the lurid, putrid orange light still painted in your sight. What a violent cry - one of rage? 

Sometimes, you feel very sure of things that you have no reason to. Like that your blade is called something more specific, or that there are other beings like you. You’re getting that sense again.

You’re very certain that beneath that scream was a cry of pain.

* * *

“You seem distracted, little thing.” Fencha sits down next to you at her table. You’re staring blankly at a half-finished copy of a local map, quill gone dry in your hand.

Your earliest memories are foggy or missing entirely, but now that you’re thinking about it, this area seems very similar to where those earliest memories took place. A very long time ago. How long have you been wandering? Decades? Centuries? 

You hop down from your stool and trot over to Fencha’s collection of maps.

“Little thing?”

You sort through the maps carefully, delicately; Fencha has instilled a deep respect for them in you. Finally, you find a map that depicts a large swathe of geography, stretching from where you are all the way far, far east. The farthest eastern part of the map is etched with the kinds of markings you now know indicate “unsure”. You point at it.

“...That land? What about it?” When you stare at her, silently prompting, Fencha hums thoughtfully. “It’s a somewhat popular area for treasure seekers, owing to legends of riches and marvelous devices and godly blessings and whatnot. I haven’t heard tales of anyone coming _back_, so I trust it’s mostly wasteland.”

You’re very certain of several things for no reason, now. First, that that is where the scream came from. Second, that that is where you came from. And third, that whoever screamed needs help, and no one else is coming to give it.

* * *

“Are you sure?” Rendel asks for the third time, as if you’re going to be able to answer in any greater depth.

You nod anyway. There’s a surprisingly large crowd of people come to see you off since Fencha divined your intention to go to those uncharted portions of the map. Rendel, obviously, and Fencha, but Pittarm and Yunwi too, even though it’s almost harvest season, and Irne, standing at the edge looking disapproving. 

(You’d overheard Rendel and Pittarm agonizing over whether to stop you from leaving. You’re glad they didn’t; that could have gotten messy.)

Weaponsmith Tesnil tried one more time to fix your blade before you set out, and seemed genuinely heartbroken that she didn’t have the skills or expertise to know how to do it better. You appreciated it anyway.

“You chart all of that and come back so we can sell the proceeds to the cartographers’ guild in Dooster, you hear me?” Fencha says. You nod, though it’s a bit of a lie. 

As you depart, you’re not thinking of anything but that shell you saw around the wicked, dreamy glow. 

**Author's Note:**

> (do you ever cry because the knight had absolutely no recollection of who the hollow knight was and went to save them anyway? because i do)
> 
> comments and kudos always, always appreciated!


End file.
